Grammar sleuths send in evidence of crimes against the apostrophe

Readers have been quick to send in their views on amiss apostrophes and other grammatical gherkins.

A double whammy from Tasmania provided by a reader.

It’s been a mixed week, enriching of mind close to home thanks to the Sydney Writers Festival yet dispiriting of heart because of the terrorist attack in Manchester. News of that crime made me consider whether to proceed with what I planned to do today: share readers’ comments on amiss apostrophes and other grammatical gherkins. But, I thought, the world must go on, even the poorly punctuated one. Plus, this is a place where we try to be friendly, and have a bit of fun. It’s a smallish endeavour in the scheme of things, but it should not change.

I’ll start with an email that made me smile. It’s from Tasmanian wife-and-husband team Pam and Tony Adams. I imagine them sporting green eyeshades and poring over my column (which shows my vintage). They also sent the photograph I’ve used here. Here’s Pam:

“Your para on apostrophes was grist to my mill! As an example I attach a sign stuck on the wall of the waiting room of the West Coast Wilderness Railway in Queenstown, Tasmania.” Pam, a former teacher, says she is concerned about the decline in grammar and punctuation. “Don’t get me started on its, it’s and its’!!! Not to mention 1900’s, 1920’s, 2000’s. And another thing! My English teacher back in the UK made us chant the mantra ‘compared with, similar to and different from’. That’s enough whingeing from me. Over to my husband who is equally punctilious.” That’s Tony, a real ps and qs man.

“Over many years I have noticed the various ways in which newspapers and more importantly books treat the two expressions ‘mind your ps and qs’ and ‘cross your ts and dot your is’. I have never seen them written like that which I think is the correct way although our brain will interpret ‘is’ incorrectly, because of familiarity. The most common method is to use p’s, q’s, t’s, i’s. Another is to capitalise the letters: Ts etc but more commonly T’s or T’S. The most complicated method I have seen, which does make some sense, is to isolate the letter with apostrophes both before and after and then pluralise: ‘p’s’ etc. I have looked at many books on grammar but never found this discussed.”

Ian Wood showshis colours by starting off with a Brisbane Broncos rugby league star: “The tattoo on Sam Thaiday’s chest says it all: ‘One brother bleeds, all brother’s bleed’.” Fiona Lewis singled out a tattoo too: “Daddies Little Girl (on a young woman).” But back to Ian. He agrees with the Bristol grammar vigilante who inspired this discussion. “As a member of the last generation of students who had to learn formal grammar and parse sentences, I wince whenever I see a grocer’s apostrophe. I have amended signs advertising banana’s and apple’s.” Ian warns
I may have opened a can of worms. To prove that prediction he sends a worm farm at me, delivering slippery errors he’s spotted, many in the media, including this newspaper. This includes the misuse of its and it’s, who’s and whose, practise and practice and principle and principal. He’s also irked by subject-verb (dis)agreement, such as when anger and hatred is in the air, and the singular usage of words such as criteria and phenomena. When it comes to less and fewer, “I’ve almost given up”. Me too. Ditto with decimate meaning to wipe out far more than 10 per cent. Ian leaves us with a laugh. A book on Phillip Adams, he notes, refers to Australia’s sexual morays. “Licentious eels cavorting in creeks and rivers?”

If Ian needs a hand amendingsigns, Ken Rubeli may be the man. On a recent coastal holiday in NSW he and his seven-year-old daughter almost fell out of their sailboat at Smiths Lake. “Together out on the water we pondered who Smith might have been and what happened to his/her apostrophe. I may be out in the dead of night amongst the Smiths Lake signage addressing the absences.” Alex George sent in a photograph, from Margaret River in Western Australia, of a banner promoting The Kazoos Teddy Bear’s Picnic. “I emailed the organisers to ask if only one bear could attend and, if so, which one, but received no reply.” Carol Seymour also shared a photo, from a shop in WA selling Ladie’s, Children’s & Babie’s Clothing. Carol, a teacher of English as a second language, now uses it “in my classroom as a ‘Find the mistakes’ activity”.

A few readers asked about my own usage. One, Tim Boreham, a former colleague, points out that I wrote about asterisks messing with the word f..king. “Surely you meant to refer to an ellipsis rather than asterisks? I would have left this unremarked under normal circumstances … but it gnawed away at me like an errant apostrophe.” Well, c’mon Tim, you used to work here. You know the drill. It Was The Subs.

While we are on swear words, here’s one I can print ellipsis-free. Peter Dobe says grammar is “the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit”. He credits that to Oscar Wilde. I don’t think that’s right, but I could be wrong. Shit does happen. John Coleman argues Shakespeare can be forgiven for Holofernes saying “The preyful princess pierc’d and prick’d a pretty pleasing pricket” in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Pricket, he kindly adds, means deer. Peta Davies was once bitten twice shy when readingJohn H. Richardson’s book about dwarfism In the Little World. “He mentions Charles I and Oliver Crumble. I should have passed on this book as soon as I saw dwarfs instead of dwarves.”

Kathie Rieth wants to know about full stops, specifically why we, in the print media, put them before the closing quotation marks in full quotes and after them in a partial quotes. (Selina said, “The catsuit is black.” Describing her catsuit, Selina said, “it is black”.) As far as I know it’s just a journalistic style decision. But I know it’s not universal. If readers are aware of any other reasons please let me know.

Ian Abbott is one tough bloke. He thinks it’s “something of a cheap shot” to “fret over errant apostrophes”. What bugs him is “the misuse (or abuse?)” of fulsome (“When used to extol someone’s virtues”); enormity (“Used to indicate large size instead of flagitiousness”); and enervate (“Misapplied to mean energise instead of weaken”). Gil Appleton is made from gentler cloth. He remembers a takeaway shop at Bondi that advertised Chicken At It’s Best. “I had to grit my teeth every time I passed it. It may still be there, but I learned to avert my gaze.” Louise Johnson feels Gil’s pain. “Any wayward apostrophe is a catastrophe. The perennially persistent ones seem to be at the fruit & veg shop: potato’s and tomato’s. Sigh.”

Liz Polednik, too, has reached the stage where a rogue apostrophe means “I just mentally roll my eyes”. She hasn’t yet yielded, though, to the “well known writers who confuse uninterested and disinterested”. She offers two lighter notes. First, should she have been amused or alarmed when, pregnant with her first child, she stepped into the Anti Natal Clinic? Second, her favourite parental note during her time as a teacher: “Johnny hasn’t come because he hasn’t been. I’ve given him something to make him go and when he’s gone he’ll come.”

Bernadette Doherty says a recent news report sent her brain into overdrive: “His words would insight violence.” “Does not compute, said my brain, until I inserted incite in place of insight.” Eric Marsh was listening to the news as he read my column and the overlap was timely. He heard the PM say, ‘‘It was a great honour for Lucy and I”. “You hear it a lot. Why so? It comes, I suspect, from generations of schoolkids being corrected for saying, ‘Me and Jimmy went to the pictures’ but without an explanation of the difference between such a phrase when it’s the subject and when it’s the object.”

Marc Bucknell isan editor and proofreader. He’s also a calligrapher, which is important in this context. When his daughter asked him to add poetic words to her maritime tattoo, he agreed. But she went ahead without his help and “the result was triply catastrophic”. Marc explains how word processing has messed up apostrophes, particularly with ornate calligraphic fonts. “It’s like putting a letter of Arial in a line of Garamond.” Well, who doesn’t panic about that?

Marc continues: “When I saw my daughter’s tattoo, I was appalled. The possessive ‘its’ didn’t only have an apostrophe, it had an upright apostrophe in a line of cursive font and it had a space after the apostrophe. Three separate errors in a three-letter word. Beat that.” Marc adds some thoughts on who else to beat (clue: the tattooist), but this is a family newspaper.

Let’s finish with novelist Carmel Bird.“I think maybe the disappearance of the apostrophe is being speeded up by the fact that on a phone one needs to switch screens to bring in the punctuation. I am an old apostrophe Nazi, but I find I can’t always be bothered. This amazes me about myself.”